Convert PDF to PNG

Why choose PNG over JPG for PDF pages?

PNG keeps the edges of text and lines perfectly sharp, which JPG does not. It suits pages made of text, lines and flat colour: technical drawings, flowcharts, sheet music, spreadsheets, code listings, maps and UI documentation. JPG compression smears letter edges and adds faint noise around thin lines, which becomes obvious when zooming in.

That makes PNG the right format for documentation sites, wikis, design mockups and editing in tools like Figma or Photoshop. Every page is rendered on a solid white background, so the images look the same in light and dark viewers. For pages that are mostly photographs, JPG gives a far smaller file with no visible difference.

Which resolution should you pick?

Pick 150 DPI for screens and 300 DPI for print. At 150 DPI a Letter page is 1275 × 1650 pixels, which is readable on any screen and fine for documentation. Choose 300 DPI when the image will be printed, cropped heavily, or zoomed. Because PNG files grow quickly with resolution, a warning appears when more than 40 pages are exported at 300 DPI.

Vector content in a PDF, such as text and line drawings, has no fixed resolution, so rendering at a higher DPI genuinely adds detail. Photos embedded in the PDF are different: if a scan was stored at 150 DPI, exporting at 300 DPI only enlarges it without adding sharpness. For scanned documents, matching the scan's original resolution gives the best balance.

What happens behind the scenes?

The PDF is opened by pdf.js in the browser and each selected page is drawn on a white canvas at the chosen scale, one page at a time to keep memory low. The canvas is then saved as PNG and named with a zero-padded page number, like manual-page-12.png.

Browsers cap a single canvas at about 16 megapixels, so oversized pages such as A1 drawings at 300 DPI are scaled down to fit, and the summary says when that has happened. If a page fails to render, the PDF may be damaged; Repair PDF often fixes it, and a lower DPI helps on devices with little memory.

Is the document uploaded?

No part of the document is uploaded, and password-protected PDFs are unlocked locally with the password typed into the page. That matters for the kind of files people often export as PNG, such as engineering drawings, unreleased product documentation and contracts with signatures. When the tab is closed, the rendered pages are gone from memory.

Which tools pair well with PNG export?

Cropping and rotating before export, and OCR or text extraction instead of export, are the most common companions. Preparing the PDF first means each PNG comes out ready to paste into a wiki or design file without further editing. All of the tools below also run in the browser:

• Crop PDF to cut a diagram out of a page before converting.
• Split PDF when you want separate PDF files rather than images.
• PNG to PDF to put edited images back into a document.
• PDF to Text when you need the words from a page rather than a picture of it.
• Rotate PDF so landscape drawings export the right way up.